Today's personal computers with graphical, “point and click” style interfaces, pose significant barriers to computer users with severe visual impairments (hereinafter referred to the “visually impaired”). This is unfortunate as personal computers have gained widespread use in not only the business world but also in personal households. For example, personal computers increasingly serve an important role in the educational development of a child or an adult. Many software applications are designed to serve as educational tools in that the user improves one or more skills or learns new skills due to interaction with the particular application. Such applications range from instructional games for children to adult curriculum type applications as well as reference applications (e.g., encyclopedia software applications).
In an effort to increase the availability of computer software applications, different types of technology has developed over the years to allow greater communication of information to the visually impaired. System have been developed using synthetic speech, braille output and keyboard commands that allow people who cannot interpret video images to make use of computers in business and in education, including accessing the Internet and the Worldwide Web.
Tactile diagrams have long been used as aids to learning for people who are blind or visually impaired. They are useful, but in many cases, require either labeling, or audio assistance either from a human reader, or a pre-prepared audio cassette to enable the user to correctly understand the diagrams. Braille labeling is helpful to the 10 to 20% of the legally blind population who are competent readers; even for this group, however, the Braille takes up spaces that might otherwise be used to provide additional graphical detail.
More recent advances in the field include devices which are designed to provide a tactile presentation (e.g., pictures, maps and diagrams) to the visually impaired. However, some practicalities have always limited the usefulness and appeal of these devices. It is often difficult for a visually impaired person to make sense of tactile shapes and textures without some extra information to confirm or augment what has been touched. One method of providing extra information is to label the tactile presentation with Braille. However, these Braille tags must be large and have plenty of blank space around the tags for them to be legible, the use of tags is not particularly effective or useful with fairly complex or graphically rich images. Furthermore, reliance on Braille labeling restricts the usefulness of tactile graphics to the group of visually impaired individuals that are competent Braille readers which is a small population subset of the much larger population constituting visually impaired individuals.
One of the initial attempts to enrich the tactile graphic experience and allow for a broader range of users involved a touch screen device which was connected to a host computer. This type of device promised to enhance the tactile experience by allowing a user to view pictures, graphs, diagrams, etc., and then the user pressed on various tactile features to hear descriptions, labels, and other explanatory audio material. While this type of device enjoyed some success, it suffers from several drawbacks which has prevented the device from gaining widespread use and popularity. First, the device typically uses a touch sensitive surface having a low resolution, so precise correspondence of graphic images and audio tags is difficult to achieve. While this device often has a speech component, it is usually derived from a synthetic speech synthesizer. Synthesized speech is not as clear as more advanced recording techniques that are currently available and also is not as “user friendly” as pre-recorded human speech which is used in various multi-media software applications (e.g., CD ROMs).
Furthermore, these devices do not provide high quality interactive programming and tactile media that supports interactive learning and entertainment. What is needed in the art and has heretofore not been available is a audio-tactile device which overcomes the above-noted deficiencies and provides a high quality interactive experience for a visually impaired user.